But at the same time the very scarcity of literacy was what gave scribal effort its primacy, and the scribal way of life was based on this scarcity. Once the scribe’s skills were eminently replaceable, his function—making copies of books—was better accomplished by ignoring tradition than by embracing it.
Two things are true about the remaking of the European intellectual landscape during the Protestant Reformation: first, it was not caused by the invention of movable type, and second, it was possible only after the invention of movable type, which aided the rapid dissemination of Martin Luther’s complaints about the Catholic Church (the 95 Theses) and the spread of Bibles printed in local languages, among its other effects. Holding those two thoughts in your head at the same time is essential to understanding any social change driven by a new technological capability. Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B.

…

In this environment a small band of scribes performed the essential service of refreshing cultural memory. By hand-copying new editions of existing manuscripts, they performed a task that could be performed no other way. The scribe was the only bulwark against great intellectual loss. His function was indispensable, and his skills were irreplaceable.
Now consider the position of the scribe at the end of the 1400s. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the middle of the century had created a sudden and massive reduction in the difficulty of reproducing a written work. For the first time in history a copy of a book could be created faster than it could be read. A scribe, someone who has given his life over to literacy as a cardinal virtue, would be conflicted about the meaning of movable type. After all, if books are good, then surely more books are better.

…

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, pointed out that although water is far more important than diamonds to human life, diamonds are far more expensive, because they are rare. The entire basis on which the scribes earned their keep vanished not when reading and writing vanished but when reading and writing became ubiquitous. If everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital.
The spread of literacy after the invention of movable type ensured not the success of the scribal profession but its end. Instead of mass professionalization, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurization. The term “scribe” didn’t get extended to everyone who could read and write. Instead, it simply disappeared, as it no longer denoted a professional class. The profession of calligrapher now survives as a purely decorative art; we make a distinction between the general ability to write and the professional ability to write in a calligraphic hand, just as we do between the general ability to drive and the professional ability to drive a race car.

TO MY PARENTS, LIZ AND JIM
Introduction
Part 1 The Page
1. A Clean Sheet: the invention of papyrus
2. Hidebound: the grisly invention of parchment
3. Pulp Fictions: the ambiguous origins of paper in China
4. From Silk Road to Paper Trail: paper goes global
Part 2 The Text
5. Stroke of Genius: the arrival of writing
6. The Prints and the Pauper: Johannes Gutenberg and the invention of movable type
7. Out of Sorts: typesetting meets the Industrial Revolution
Part 3 Illustrations
8. Saints and Scriveners: the rise of the illuminated manuscript
9. Ex Oriente Lux: woodcut comes to the West
10. Etching a Sketch: copperplate printing and the Renaissance
11. Better Imaging Through Chemistry: lithography, photography, and modern book printing
Part 4 Form
12. Books Before the Book: papyrus scrolls and wax tablets
13.

…

Gutenberg sank the money into his new workshop and promptly defaulted upon the interest payments.19 Fust must have been incandescent in his rage, and yet, two years later, as recorded in the inevitable court judgment, he would go on to lend Gutenberg another 800 Rheingulden on the condition that Gutenberg take on Fust’s adopted son, Peter Schöffer, as his foreman. Gutenberg assented, Schöffer was hired, and Fust paid out the second loan.20
Why was Fust so ready to throw good money after bad? The prize that Gutenberg had dangled in front of his financier was, of course, the invention of movable type: the promise that a book could be replicated over and over again with minimal effort. In an era when a handwritten Bible commanded a price equivalent to a laborer’s yearly wage, the ability to print an endless run of books must have appeared as a license to mint Rheingulden.21 And so Fust was content, if not entirely happy, to leave Gutenberg to tinker with the devices that littered his printing workshop in anticipation of the truly colossal profits that lay ahead if the process could be perfected.

…

Even as late as the eighteenth century, European writers lamented the failure of their indigenous inks to match the deep black color and permanence of their favored “India ink.”54 The Chinese themselves may have started to believe the hype: by the tenth century, ink was being mixed with substances such as turnip, foxglove juice, and bile for use as a medicine to stop bleeding.55 But as enticing as Chinese ink was to calligraphers and doctors, it was a stumbling block for Chinese printers who tried to move beyond simple woodblock printing. Their water-based ink did not adhere well to metal, earthenware, or porcelain and produced blotchy, indistinct images.56
Another famed Chinese invention bound up with books and bookmaking also proved to be an obstacle to the wider adoption of movable type. Chinese paper was too delicate to withstand the pressure needed to form a crisp impression, requiring that printers use handheld brushes rather than firm mechanical presses to impress their paper onto their type. Not only that, China’s water-based ink tended to seep through the paper and made it impossible to print on both sides of a sheet.57
In the end, however, Chinese movable type was undone as much by economics as by anything else.

A rabitstoke, I learn, is a plane for shaping complicated grooves, or rabbets; the two wooden screws, holding an adjustable fence, are part of the tool.5 Small wooden screws were also used to make bench vises and assorted clamps; large wooden screws adjusted the vertical and horizontal angle of cannons.
The most famous use of screws in the Middle Ages was in printing presses. Johannes Gutenberg played a pivotal role in the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s; unfortunately, there is no surviving description of his press. The earliest known representation of a printing press is about fifty years later. It consists of a heavy wood frame with a crosspiece through which a large screw is threaded. The screw is turned by means of a handspike, or lever, and pushes down a wooden board, which in turn presses the paper against the inked type.

It is worth examining in some detail not only Pacioli’s life but also his times, because in his century Italy was shaken by a renaissance in mathematics and a communications revolution which both bore directly on the staying power of double entry itself.
Luca Pacioli’s double-entry bookkeeping treatise Particularis de computis et scripturis (‘Particulars of Reckonings and Writings’) was published in his mathematical encyclopaedia in Venice in 1494, forty years after the invention of movable type in Europe and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. It appeared in the same decade that Columbus sighted America and Vasco da Gama discovered a sea route to India, at a time when mathematics was taught as astrology in the universities of Europe and witches were burnt at the stake. And yet five hundred years later his bookkeeping treatise remains the foundation of modern accounting and its system is still in use throughout the world.

Journal for the History of Astronomy 38 (2007): 351–64.
Zamoyski, Adam. The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture. New York: Hippocrene, 2004.
Footnotes
1 Medieval scholar Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187) compiled this edition from several Arabic translations of the original (lost) Greek text. Gerard is said to have completed the work at Toledo in 1175, but its publication waited half a century after the invention of movable type, to be issued in Venice in 1515.
2 Copernicus’s realization that bad money drives good money out of circulation often goes by the name Gresham’s Law, in honor of Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1519–1579), a financial adviser to English royalty who made the same wise observation. The concept was also put forward by medieval philosopher Nicole Oresme and mentioned by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in his comedy The Frogs.
3 Against all odds, the entire handwritten, original manuscript of On the Revolutions survives to this day—a bound stack of yellowed paper two hundred sheets thick—in ultrasafe keeping at the Library of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
4Theodoric of Reden, Copernicus’s fellow canon in Varmia, then served as the chapter’s representative to the papal court at Rome.
5While working together in Frauenburg, Rheticus and Copernicus observed a comet that they judged to be supralunar, just as Tycho later demonstrated to the world.

As tended to happen in corporate America, the executives had looked at the last three years of revenues, then extrapolated from those a trend line that extended off to infinity.
As required by law, the prospectus also contained an exhaustive examination of the potential risks. Chief among these was piracy, which had plagued the recording industry since its inception. (In fact, piracy had plagued the creative industries since the invention of movable type, and in the context of copyright infringement, the term “pirate” was more than 300 years old.) Piracy was something every recording executive took seriously, and already, as a result of the physical bootlegging of compact discs, PolyGram had been forced to exit certain markets in Asia and Latin America entirely. Bootlegging in those countries was more a product of organized crime syndicates than individual actors, but there was a risk that, with the rise of the home CD burner, the problem could spread to Europe and the United States.

And we thus come to the crux of the accelerative
process in society, for the engine is being fed a richer and richer fuel every day.
KNOWLEDGE AS FUEL
The rate at which man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe
has been spiraling upward for 10,000 years. The rate took a sharp upward leap with the
invention of writing, but even so it remained painfully slow over centuries of time. The next
great leap forward in knowledge—acquisition did not occur until the invention of movable
type in the fifteenth century by Gutenberg and others. Prior to 1500, by the most optimistic
estimates, Europe was producing books at a rate of 1000 titles per year. This means, give or
take a bit, that it would take a full century to produce a library of 100,000 titles. By 1950,
four and a half centuries later, the rate had accelerated so sharply that Europe was producing
120,000 titles a year.

For thousands of years, writing was chiseled into clay and stone, scratched onto wax or bark or leather; painted on bamboo or papyrus or silk—but always one copy at a time and, except for the inscriptions on monuments, always for a tiny readership. Then in China between the second and sixth centuries, paper, ink and printing with carved wooden blocks were all invented, permitting many copies of a work to be made and distributed. It took a thousand years for the idea to catch on in remote and backward Europe. Then, suddenly, books were being printed all over the world. Just before the invention of movable type, around 1450, there were no more than a few tens of thousands of books in all of Europe, all handwritten; about as many as in China in 100 B.C., and a tenth as many as in the Great Library of Alexandria. Fifty years later, around 1500, there were ten million printed books. Learning had become available to anyone who could read. Magic was everywhere.
More recently, books, especially paperbacks, have been printed in massive and inexpensive editions.

Turning a 0 into a 6 or a 9 was temptingly easy, and a 1 could be readily converted into a 4, 6, 7, or 9 (one reason Europeans write 7 as v-). Although the new numbers had gained their first foothold in Italy, where education levels were high, Florence issued an edict in 1229 that forbade bankers from using the "infidel" symbols. As a result, many people who wanted to learn the new system had to disguise themselves as Moslems in order to do so.15
The invention of printing with movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century was the catalyst that finally overcame opposition to the full use of the new numbers. Now the fraudulent alterations were no longer possible. Now the ridiculous complications of using Roman numerals became clear to everyone. The breakthrough gave a great lift to commercial transactions. Now al-Khowarizmi's multiplication tables became something that all school children have had to learn forever after.

…

Cardano called his book De Vita Propria Liber (The Book Of My Life) and what a life it was! Actually, Cardano's intellectual curiosity was far stronger than his ego. In his autobiography, for example, he lists the four main achievements of the times in which he lived: the new era of exploration into the two-thirds of the world that the ancients never knew, the invention of firearms and explosives, the invention of the compass, and the invention of printing from movable type.
Cardano was a skinny man, with a long neck, a heavy lower lip, a wart over one eye, and a voice so loud that even his friends complained about it. According to his own account, he suffered from diarrhea, ruptures, kidney trouble, palpitations, even the infection of a nipple. And he boasted, "I was ever hot-tempered, single-minded, and given to women" as well as "cunning, crafty, sarcastic, diligent, impertinent, sad, treacherous, magician and sorcerer, miserable, hateful, lascivious, obscene, lying, obsequious, fond of the prattle of old men."

As China’s population grew, so did the demand for silver, which served for money on all the linked continents.20
The novelties from European trade in the East Indies and the New World promoted new commercial institutions, created a fresh group of entrepreneurs, and stimulated the imagination of contemporaries. Public discussions ensued that analyzed these economic novelties. Fresh intellectual interests, enhanced by a new vocabulary, became crucial to the modern transformation of traditional countries. Many mechanical devices and institutional procedures became useful to entrepreneurs without themselves being causes of the emergence of capitalism. The invention of movable type made printing cheaper, promoting a book trade that carried news of explorations throughout Europe. The Greek astrolabe and compass proved a great aid to navigating the waters of three oceans. Italian double-entry bookkeeping enabled merchants to keep better track of their profits. All these improvements contributed to industrial enterprise, but they didn’t cause capitalism to appear; they were propitious factors in its development.

This is not
really necessary, for LATEX need not be married to any particular set of
fonts, especially with the New Font Selection Scheme (Appendix A) which
simplifies font installation enormously. The main fonts used in this book,
for example, are Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans, and Lucida Sans Typewriter,
designed by Bigelow & Holmes and distributed by Y&Y Inc.
G.2.1
Font families
Typography is the study and classification of typefaces, something that
goes back to Gutenberg’s invention of movable type (not of the printing
press, which was invented by the Chinese) five and a half centuries ago.
Since that time, many families of fonts have been created, bearing classical
names like Baskerville, Garamond, Univers, etc. Each member of such a
family has the same overall design, or basic look, but vary by being slanted,
italic, bold, or thin; and of course, they come in different sizes.
Font families are classified according to certain criteria that often
determine to what use they will be put.

Thus universal explanatory theories of justice, legitimacy and morality began to take their place alongside universal theories of matter and motion. In all those cases, universality was being sought deliberately, as a desirable feature in its own right – even a necessary feature for an idea to be true – and not just as a means of solving a parochial problem.
A jump to universality that played an important role in the early history of the Enlightenment was the invention of movable-type printing. Movable type consisted of individual pieces of metal, each embossed with one letter of the alphabet. Earlier forms of printing had merely streamlined writing in the same way that Roman numerals streamlined tallying: each page was engraved on a printing plate and thus all the symbols on it could be copied in a single action. But, given a supply of movable type with several instances of each letter, one does no further metalwork.

Generative intangibles will rise above the free. Think of the world flowing.
4
SCREENING
In ancient times culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation, and rhetoric instilled in oral societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate, and the subjective. We were People of the Word. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s 1450 invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, printed text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science, libraries, and law. Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

The massive changes may aid some, but will also feed much of global conflict.
History supports his contention. For example, the printing press revolutionized human awareness and knowledge, but it also sparked the bloody conflicts of the Reformation that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, which left nearly a third of Europe dead. Today we are living through its modern parallel. “The Internet is the greatest tool for spreading knowledge and hatred since the invention of movable type.” Robotics have an even greater potential for both good and ill.
And from this conflict emerges, tells Peters. There will be battles because of change and battles to resist change. “The root causes of conflict in the 21st century are humanity’s default positions.... In times of crisis, when humans have to ask the fundamental question of ‘Who am I?’ they fall back on the defaults, conflicts of blood and belief. . . .

Windmills emerged in several parts of the world, facilitating expertise with elaborate gearing machines that would subsequently support the first calculating machines.
The invention in the thirteenth century of a weight-driven clock using the cam technology perfected for windmills and waterwheels freed society from structuring their lives around the sun. Perhaps the most significant invention of the late Middle Ages was Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press, which opened intellectual life beyond an elite controlled by church and state.
By the seventeenth century, technology had created the means for empires to span the globe. Several European countries, including England, France, and Spain, were developing economies based on far-flung colonies. This colonization spawned the emergence of a merchant class, a worldwide banking system, and early forms of intellectual property protection, including the patent.

”
* The cleric was a keen military man as well, in common with most Montenegrins, and liked to show his skills by having an attendant toss into the air a lemon, which he would speedily shoot and destroy. “A singular accomplishment for a Bishop,” wrote a British diplomat who met him.
* About which Werner Herzog made a film, Fitzcarraldo, some years ago.
† Including Cyrillic volumes printed by a press set up in Cetinje in 1493, just twenty years after Caxton invented the idea of movable type. But as befits the weird mix of scholarship and war characterizing the Montenegrin, the lead type had to be melted down soon after and made into bullets instead.
* The diplomats who were posted to Cetinje worked rather little—one result being that it was not until 1995 that someone noticed that a formal state of war still existed between Montenegro and Japan. It had been declared in 1905, and no one had bothered to lift it.

To protect the analogies
suggested here from the threat of mere speculation, and to restrict them
carefully to whatever valuable insight they can provide, such passages are
annotated so as to provide readers with information about the limits and
extensions of the comparisons made.16
The arc of this history sets out with a library guide, not in the sense of
an agent that shows the way around the library, but in terms of marking
the place where cataloging principles mature in the form of the card index,
leading to other applications. And it ends in the age of the ofﬁce, an era
of productivity minus the concept “service,” and of ofﬁce devices minus
electricity.
2 Temporary Indexing
With the invention and spread of printing with movable type, a complaint
arises in the learned reading world. It is the book ﬂood, always a nautical
or irrigation metaphor, that has a disturbing effect on readers in the newly
established privacy of their studies.1 “There are so many books that we lack
the time even to read the titles,” notes the Italian bibliographer Anton
Francesco Doni in 1550, already pointing toward the increasing reading of
titles and footnotes as a principal reaction to too many texts.2 The explosion of written material after the introduction of the printing press brings
a lot of attention to the library, which it did not garner in medieval times.

Medieval inventions may not have produced sustainable Schumpeterian growth, but as always, technological progress had unintended consequences, and these affected the trajectory that Europe took after 1500. The progressive attitudes of medieval culture were not guaranteed to last, and they did not; by the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church had become more inward looking, conservative, and averse to change. But it let the genie out of the bottle. Technological creativity blossomed in fifteenth-century Europe, including the invention of the movable-type printing press, the casting of iron, and major advances in shipbuilding and navigational instruments.
How should we think of the cultural changes relevant to subsequent economic development in the centuries between 1500 and 1700? As we have seen, religious beliefs were profoundly transformed in this age and in some ways made to coexist with and even encourage experimental science. Another important cultural element in the growth of technological creativity in early modern Europe is an openness to and willingness to absorb and exploit foreign ideas.

Many changes occurred in fifteenth-century Europe that helped to lay the foundation for the scientific revolution. National governments were consolidated in France under Charles VII and Louis XI and in England under Henry VII. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 sent Greek scholars fleeing westward to Italy and beyond. The Renaissance intensified interest in the natural world and set higher standards for the accuracy of ancient texts and their translation. The invention of printing with movable type made scholarly communication far quicker and cheaper. The discovery and exploration of America reinforced the lesson that there is much that the ancients did not know. In addition, according to the “Merton thesis,” the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century set the stage for the great scientific breakthroughs of seventeenth-century England. The sociologist Robert Merton supposed that Protestantism created social attitudes favorable to science and promoted a combination of rationalism and empiricism and a belief in an understandable order in nature—attitudes and beliefs that he found in the actual behavior of Protestant scientists.24
It is not easy to judge how important were these various external influences on the scientific revolution.

Merchants, meanwhile, often developed sufficient trust in each other, through repeated dealing, that they were willing to extend credit. One merchant, for example, sold four pieces of cloth to two other merchants who agreed to pay their debt, on demand, at any one of sixteen fairs held during a particular month in the next year.9
Now let’s move forward another several centuries. The invention of the printing press with movable type by Gutenberg around 1440 led to the explosive growth of the media business, including newspapers. Before 1800, print newspapers had begun to publish classified ads. These ran the gamut from ads for people looking for marriage, to ads for people looking to rent a room, to ads for medical wares or even haberdashery or drapery.10 According to a history of advertising by the industry publication Advertising Age, “[b]y 1800 most English and American newspapers were not only supported by advertising but were the primary medium carrying it.”11
At first, newspapers didn’t impose any structure on the classifieds, so it was hard to find things.

On November 19, 2007, Jeff Bezos stepped onto a stage at the W Hotel in lower Manhattan to introduce the Kindle. He spoke to an audience of a hundred or so journalists and publishing executives, a relatively small crowd compared to the reverential throngs who gathered for the product rollouts of Apple. Wearing a blue sport coat and khakis, Bezos stated that Amazon’s new device was the successor to the five-hundred-and-fifty-year-old invention of blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg, the movable-type printing press. “Why are books the last bastion of analog?” Bezos asked that day. “The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and as well suited to its task as the book, and if so, how?”
The original Kindle, priced at $399, was clearly the product of all the compromises and anxieties that had gone into its labored three-year development. It was meant to disappear in the reader’s hands, yet it sported a wedge-shaped body with a jumble of angular buttons, an attempt to make a bold design statement while allowing for the easy entry of text.

But a more decisive breakthrough than the Renaissance was the advent of the Reformation and the ensuing fragmentation of Western Christianity after 1517. This was in large measure because of the revolutionary role of the printing press, surely the single most important technological innovation of the period before the Industrial Revolution. As we have seen, the Chinese can claim to have invented printing with a press (see Chapter 1). But Gutenberg’s system of movable metal type was more flexible and scalable than anything developed in China. As he said, ‘the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types’ allowed for the very rapid production of pamphlets and books. It was far too powerful a technology to be monopolized (as Gutenberg hoped it could be). Within just a few years of his initial breakthrough in Mainz, presses had been established by imitators – notably the Englishman William Caxton – in Cologne (1464), Basel (1466), Rome (1467), Venice (1469), Nuremberg, Utrecht, Paris (1470), Florence, Milan, Naples (1471), Augsburg (1472), Budapest, Lyon, Valencia (1473), Kraków, Bruges (1474), Lübeck, Breslau (1475), Westminster, Rostock (1476), Geneva, Palermo, Messina (1478), London (1480), Antwerp, Leipzig (1481), Odense (1482) and Stockholm (1483).17 Already by 1500 there were over 200 printing shops in Germany alone.